Denial continues to be the biggest obstacle to effectively addressing the continuing risks at Fukushima Daiichi.

This is the inevitable outcome when corporate interests control what amount to national security risks. TEPCO is still trying to make money…or, more correctly, not to lose so much money.

In spite of everything, the  #1 priority of the company continues to be shielding its controllers from “unnecessary” financial exposure.

This priority flies in the face of its obligation to the wronged Japanese people.

Despite the fact that the Governor of Fukushima has said in no uncertain terms that neither Fukushima Daini nor Fukushima Daiichi will ever be allowed to operate again, TEPCO is actually pushing for the remaining reactors there to be reopened!

In the wake of revelations that over 3,000 workers at the crippled Daichi facility wore lead-shielding on their dosimeters to defeat the devices’ radiation recording function, TEPCO is now said to have turned to the Yakuza to supply workers for the dangerous jobs associated with clean-up and keeping the crippled reactors barely simmering rather than boiling dry.

A league of gangsters, well accustomed to doing  dirty work for Japanese business interests,  the Yakuza would hardly be most people’s first choice as recruiters for the kind of sensitive and highly skilled labor that is necessary to avoid escalating disaster at Fukushima.

TEPCO has sent out their messengers to gather as many workers as possible, officials in Fukushima reportedly told local businesses, “Bring us the living dead. People no one will miss.”

Those hapless and unskilled workers are facing a danger of unknown proportions.  

Fairewinds Associates’ Arnie Gundersen has just returned from a visit to Japan, where he discussed with members of the Diet, lawyers and citizen activists, the status of the devastated Fuskushima facilities.   Focussing especially on the spent fuel pool in Reactor 4, which many experts agree is continuously at risk of boiling dry, he told an audience in Kyoto that the reason the US extended its evacuation zone recommendation to an 80-km radius was because of this specific risk:

“In 1997, the laboratory did a study showing that if a nuclear-fuel pool were to boil dry, it would release enough radiation to cause the permanent evacuation of those living within an 80 km radius (of the complex)…The Fukushima plant’s reactor 4 (pool) has 1,500 fuel bundles. That’s more cesium than was released into the atmosphere from all of the nuclear bombs ever exploded, (which total) more than 700 over a period of 30 years.”

It’s like a bad plot from a drive-in double feature.  All that’s missing now is Godzilla.